Definitions

Discharge refers to individuals exiting parole supervision.
Successful discharges include persons who have completed the term of conditional
supervision. Unsuccessful discharges include revocations of parole, returns
to prison or jail, and absconders. Parolees who are transferred to other
jurisdictions and those who die while under supervision are not included
in the calculation of success/failure rates.

Federal Supervised Release established by the Sentencing
Reform Act of 1984 (SRA), is a term of conditional community supervision
set by the court at the time of sentencing. The SRA also abolished release
by a parole board, required a determinate sentence term, and limited the
amount of good time that can be credited toward the sentence.

Parole is a period of conditional community supervision
following a prison term. If the conditions of supervision are violated,
the parolee can be returned to prison to serve any of the remaining portion
of the sentence.

- Discretionary parole exists when a parole board
has authority to conditionally release prisoners based on a statutory
or administrative determination of eligibility.

- Mandatory parole generally occurs in jurisdictions
using determinate sentencing statutes in which inmates are conditionally
released from prison after serving a specified portion of their original
sentence minus any good time earned.

Parole violators are offenders returned to prison for violating
the conditions of their release or for a new offense committed while under
parole supervision.

- Expiration of sentence includes inmates whose maximum
court sentence minus credits has been served and are released without
any term of community supervision.

- First releases are inmates released from prison
for the first time on their current offense.

- Re-releases are inmates leaving prison after having
served time either for a violation of parole or other conditional release
or for a new offense committed while under parole supervision.

Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in the rearrest, reconviction, or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner's release.

Reentry
is a broad term used to refer to issues related to the transition of
offenders from prison to community supervision. Reentry on this site
refers to persons released from State or Federal prisons or discharged
from State parole, Federal parole, or Federal Supervised Release. Persons
released from local jails are not included.

State parole includes the conditional release of offenders
under the jurisdiction of a State agency or authority.

Truth-in-sentencingrefers to release policies that
require offenders to serve a certain percentage of their sentence before
becoming eligible for release from prison.